Working at Sucker Punch Productions

At Sucker Punch I was tasked with the implementation of their sound propagation system for all architectural assets and enclosed space locations. I was the sole person working to get this done, and the understanding of roadblocks that could arise from other team’s workflows were not yet defined. As a result I had to be independently organized and time efficient, as well as needing to communicate with many teams to find out what how they operate and what tool system they could be using that would complicate my work.

For a high level overview, the standard asset would require me to get an understanding of its internal space and variations from procedural systems. If a building is wood, a volume is needed to encompass the space the player can occupy to alter the soundscape realistically. If a sound happens just outside the window, this shouldn’t have the same reverb and attenuation as a sound inside a building, though it should be diminished so that it spatially sounds like it comes from outside the window. So any door or window would need an additional volume to more specifically direct the sound to achieve this effect. If a window is slightly occluded by blinds, the windows volume needs to have its parameters tweaked to reflect that. My work was primarily done in Maya, with constant iteration and testing through the company’s game engine.

One major cross team roadblock came from the environment art team’s proprietary workflow for module changes to buildings. In one instance, a buildings window has blinds, but in another instance of the building, that window could be a solid wall instead. This can be expanded to being as complicated as whole interiors and rooms being included. While this procedural consideration was known by the audio team, the actual steps to work with it were not defined, and required me to reach out to the creators and users of the system to see how I could slot in my work without disrupting what they had done. Translating and developing solutions between the audio and environment teams was an essential part of the job.